How psychedelics taught me how to feel

A good story with some questionable choices.

Part 1: The Trip

When I was 36 I broke up with a man that wanted to marry me.

I was past my pre-determined ‘scary’ age for being single (35), so this break up hit me hard. I entered a period of depression for the first time. How did I end up here? What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I figure out love? I spent most evenings smoking spliffs and watching Netflix, attempting to numb out the pain.

That was mostly my way of coping with feelings. Numbing out. Working out. Staying busy. Or just trying to change the channel in my mind and shove them out of the way. Lalala I’m not going to think about this. No one had taught me or modeled to me how to feel and, like most of us, I didn’t ever want to feel bad. Of course, this was a core reason I was struggling romantically. I didn’t know how to tune into and trust my feelings. I was all up in my head, talking myself into relationships that looked good on paper.

Around that time my friend Adam approached me with a proposition…

Adam is a psychonaut, meaning he has deep personal experience with psychedelics. Not only has he gone to every dimension and realm possible on most compounds available, but he also really understands the science of psychedelics. If interested, he runs a YouTube channel called Psychedelic Vantage where he interviews the leading figures in biotech that are working to get psychedelics FDA approved to address issues like anxiety and depression.

Adam had recently resolved his decade-long struggle with depression through intentional use of psychedelics, especially DMT, which is the active ingredient in ayahuasca. In an ayahuasca ceremony, you drink a “brew” with DMT and another compound for a trip that lasts 4-6 hours. However, you can also smoke pure DMT for a short (15-20 minute), very intense, psychedelic experience. This is what Adam was doing … and he was so impressed by what he was able to shift for himself using this approach, that he wanted to start facilitating guided DMT journeys with his coaching clients. And he wanted to know if he could practice on me…

I like adventures, so I sad yes immediately. I had no idea what I was in for. Prior to this I’d done psychedelics a few times recreationally but never with any sort of intention. This time though I had a real need: I was depressed and I was lost. Not only had I just ended a serious relationship, I felt lost in New York, where I’d lived for four years. I hadn’t really made the friends I wanted and felt more like I was existing in the city instead of truly living in it. I didn’t feel embedded in the fabric of the culture. My social life felt superficial and flat.

So anyways, Adam came over and practiced administering DMT on me… it was intense to say the least. DMT is incredibly powerful and when you smoke it it hits you at 100mph. The psychedelic requires you to immediately release the control most of us keep in our mind if you’re going to fully access its gateway to insights, other dimensions, and other-worldly beings. Otherwise you hang out in this space DMT trip-goers call ‘the waiting room’: a place full of geometric patterns that’s nice, but not insightful or profound.

Releasing this control was one of the scariest things I’d ever done, but it was a pivotal moment in my personal growth; I believe it was one of the dominos that had to fall to open up my capacity to feel. The release felt like a full body orgasm x 10000. I was catapulted into many different spaces in my mind, but ultimately into a quiet black emptiness where I met two blue beings that I was able to ask: what should I do with my life? Their reply was simple: Have fun.

This sounds vague and generic of course. But the thing that’s so transformative about psychedelics is, if you’ve prepared safely and if you’re tuned in in an intentional way, the messages you receive go far beyond an intellectual understanding. You don’t just know something, you feel something deeply in your body. And it’s this deep, body-felt knowing that changes how you think and feel about yourself and your life in an everyday way when you return to this dimension.

I exited that trip after ten minutes, firing on all cylinders. The DMT had reset my nervous system. Chronic nerve pain I’d been struggling with all year was completely gone. And I was genuinely excited. I knew the solution to my depression was to go out and have fun. And so I set out to do just that. I still didn’t know what it meant to feel your feelings, but I was about to find out.

Part 2: The Orbs of Energy

I decided having fun would mean spending New Years and a few weeks of January in Mexico. I had a few friends living in Playa del Carmen at the time, so I headed down there. Fun was had, of course. And Adam had equipped me with some microdoses of psilocybin (mushrooms). Having one of these every couple of days helped keep me open, creative, and optimistic and I believe further primed my body for the transformation that would happen a few days later.

On New Years Eve I met a sexy man, a friend of a friend, and we shared a super fun evening together that ended up at his house. In the morning, however, I woke up and in the sober light of day realized he wasn’t thinking or operating in a way that made me feel safe. I had gone from a very high high to a very low low in less than 6 hours. I was more or less ‘trapped’ at his house in a gated residential neighborhood, only accessible by car, on the other end of the city from my Airbnb. I hope my mother never reads this. It was a very intense experience and I was filled with anxiety.

I was lucky that he was happy to drive me home and I was able to extricate myself from the situation. Getting into the apartment was a relief. It was a beautiful, sunlit space, hand-built using local techniques and styles by a French photographer expat who’d lived in the area for 20 years. It was a space with Character.

I’d be working with a therapist at the time on feeling. She’d tell me I needed to feel my feelings to understand what I wanted romantically. She’d tell me I needed to integrate the parts of myself that had split from each other if I was going to heal. I wouldn’t really know what she meant. She wouldn’t really be able to explain it. It would go on like this. Needless to say, I don’t work with that therapist anymore.

Anyways, given I’d just gone through something intense I decided to try and practice feeling my feelings like she’d told me to, whatever that meant. I changed into my sweats and sat down on the sofa. I closed my eyes and started breathing deeply in and out, focusing on my body. Soon after I started, my entire body started to tingle and light up with energy. It was like little gentle warm prickles or bubbles all over every part of my skin. Woah. I’d never felt anything like that before. I kept breathing. The sensation remained.

I kept allowing the sensations and breathing into the sensations and suddenly the center of my torso, my solar plexus, started to tingle more than the rest of my body, it felt like a portal opening up. And then the same thing happened in the middle of my forehead. And on both my palms. My palms felt so alive with energy it felt like I was holding two orbs in my hands. These sensations went on for hours. And I rode them. Marveling at what was happening in my body. It felt cool! I wasn’t scared.

But the most important moment was this: every time I started to think, I could feel the sensations in my body lessen. I liked the sensations, I didn’t want them to lessen, so I would tune back into them and push them to be as loud and bright as possible. It was in this moment that I learned how to feel. I finally understood the difference between thinking and feeling.

Four years later, I still don’t know exactly what triggered this experience. But I chalk it up to the deep psychedelic work I’d just started doing, plus an intense emotional situation of highs and lows, plus deep breathing. I have since achieved similar sensations doing Holotropic Breathwork.

Part 3: The impact of feeling

The experience lasted about 3 hours. When I returned to neutral I was a different person. I had reconnected to my body. There is my life before this incident, and my life after. For days after random people on the street would come up to me and say things like “you are the sun” or “your aura is a rainbow”. No one had ever said anything like that to me before. Something had changed in the way I moved through the world. When I returned home friends would comment “you seem so much more chill.” And I was. I think I’d released decades of trapped emotions that were blocking my body’s ability to relax.

Prior to this experience I had shunned anything woo or spiritual. My father is a scientist and I grew up in an Atheist household that didn’t talk about feelings. After this experience I became curious. I learned that the places on my body where I’d felt the sensation of a portal opening up were chakra points. I got Reiki. I could feel them moving the energy in my body.

I used to cry so easily, at everything. I once cried an unreasonable amount in a glowing performance review. I couldn’t handle the emotional experience. I’d push any strong emotion down, creating a blockage over years and years, leaving very little space for new emotions. Meaning any new big feeling would be forced to come out of my body in tears.

But after Mexico I started allowing my feelings, because I knew how to process them out and through as soon as they came up. Maybe I’d shed a little tear here and there as the emotion moved through me, but the more I allowed my feelings to bubble up and emerge and flow out of me, the less I’d cry in general. I had expanded my body’s capacity to handle feelings.

I started allowing myself to show my emotions and talk about my real emotions in both my personal and professional life, creating deeper relationships with everyone around me. Vulnerability creates connection. None of this ‘everything is fine’ bullshit I previously used to peddle.

This experience gave me the language to teach my clients how to process their feelings and this became a core part of my work. Professional alignment requires the ability to follow your body’s signals. Because I’ve been through not knowing and then understanding, I can explain with precise detail how to locate a feeling and move it through its lifecycle so that it is removed from the body. This is a skill that is so fundamental it should be taught in Kindergarten. Because 50% of life is uncomfortable feelings.

I had a client complete this week and he said that one of his top ‘aha moments’ from our work together was:

“That you really can feel your emotions in your body. My therapist tried for years to get me to feel my emotions without much success, but with you, I was able to unlock that ability.”

I really consider this part of my life’s work.

Most importantly, learning how to feel gave me the tools to start to trust myself and my intuition in my business and in my relationships, leading me to places and people that fit me better, which created an upward spiral towards everything I wanted. After Mexico I proceeded to go on a year-long quest to totally remake my social life. But that’s a different story for another day.

Until then, feel your feelings! They’re at the core of your Character and the compass to your deepest goals and dreams. Because, ultimately, the secret to almost everything is to follow the sparkle. And that’s a feeling.

PS. PS. If you liked this essay you might also like I burned down my social life and started again and I got fired (twice). It was the wake-up call I needed

PPS. I teach people how to use your emotions to increase your trust yourself and your intuition so you can create whatever’s important to you. Schedule a consultation to learn more about my 1x1 work.